Former national Butterfly Clicking/CPS record holder
My favorite lesson from CPS training is that top speed is not raw panic. It is a repeatable rhythm with relaxed recovery.
Speedcraft / Micro-Games / Mechanical Puzzles
Speedcraft Notes
A small notebook for games and puzzles where the winning move is half algorithm, half hand control. I like these tiny domains because they reward the same habits as research: abstraction, error budgets, precise experiments, and calm execution under time pressure.
National runner-up in Nine Linked Rings, 3:04 solve
The puzzle looks like hand dexterity, but the real advantage is state compression: know the next legal move before your fingers ask.
Hardcore Guides
Small games, serious technique.
Clean speed beats noisy speed.
The beginner mistake is trying to click harder. The better goal is to make each burst boringly repeatable.
- Train in 8-second windows: 3 seconds warm-up, 3 seconds peak, 2 seconds clean exit.
- Keep wrist pressure low; the finger oscillation should feel springy, not forced.
- Track three numbers: peak CPS, average CPS, and misclick drift. Peak without control is not skill.
- Stop immediately if the forearm feels sharp or numb. Good speedcraft is sustainable speedcraft.
Memorize states, not motions.
Nine Linked Rings is a tiny finite-state machine disguised as a traditional puzzle. The fastest solves come from chunking legal states rather than reacting ring by ring.
- Use parity checkpoints: after each major block, know whether the next unlock depends on ring 1 or ring 2.
- Practice the last five rings alone until the hand route is automatic.
- Do not look at the ring you are moving; look one move ahead at the gate it enables.
- Time splits by block, not by full solve. A bad middle split is easier to repair than a vague bad run.
Play for information velocity.
No-flag Minesweeper is a pattern-recognition sprint. The best runs are won by reducing hesitation between local proofs.
- Favor openings that create long chord-like cascades, even if a nearby cell is locally tempting.
- Learn the canonical 1-2, 1-2-1, 1-2-2-1, and edge 1-1 shapes until they are visual reflexes.
- When stuck, scan borders clockwise once. Random eye jumps are the silent time sink.
- Separate proof speed from mouse speed in training; otherwise you cannot see which one failed.
Turn perception into indexing.
In SET-like visual games, brute force scanning is fragile. A reliable player converts the board into a few searchable axes.
- Anchor by the rarest attribute first; rare colors or shapes reduce the candidate space fastest.
- Scan triples by complement: for any two cards, the third card is determined.
- Do not chase a half-seen pattern. If it does not resolve in one breath, reset to the anchor axis.
- Practice with a metronome: decision quality under fixed rhythm matters more than raw staring time.